Musée National Picasso-Paris

You are approaching the Hôtel Salé, a seventeenth-century mansion that now serves as the Musée National Picasso-Paris. The building was originally commissioned by Pierre Aubert de Fontenay, a man who grew immensely wealthy as a collector of the royal salt tax. Because his fortune came from this specific tax, locals dubbed his flamboyant new home the Hôtel Salé, or Salted Mansion. Aubert enjoyed his residence for only a few years before his downfall, after which the property served many purposes, including as the Venetian Embassy, a school where the writer Honoré de Balzac studied, and even an exhibition warehouse for a bronze worker.